DESIGNING THE FUTURE IN EDUCATIONAL STRATEGIES OF RUSSIAN YOUTH

Представленная статья реализует попытку авторов осмыслить на основе деятельностно-активистского подхода конструирование будущего в образовательных стратегиях российской молодежи. На базе концептуального социально-эмпирического анализа авторы статьи приходят к выводу о том, что большинство молодых россиян разделяют позиции адаптивности, актуализма в качестве выбора образовательной стратегии. Это определяется факторами объективного и субъективного характера, где объективизация социальных условий выступает влияющей на субъективный выбор молодежи. Отмечая значимость социальной и территориальной дифференциации, авторы статьи обосновывают положение о конструировании будущего, о формировании образов жизни и набора жизненных целей российской молодежи как возможности ухода от ограниченности прагматического поворота в образовании. В качестве заключительного суждения определяется взаимосвязь между ориентацией на квалифицированную деятельность и конфигурацию ответов на изменения в образовательной системе. Делается вывод о том, что в отечественной социально-гуманитарной науке назрела необходимость осмысления образовательных стратегий российской молодежи как способности российской молодежи конструировать образ будущего с учетом нарастания влияния социальных инноваций. The presented paper implements the authors' attempt to understand, on the basis of an activist approach, the design of the future in the educational strategies of Russian youth. Based on a conceptual socio-empirical analysis, the authors of the publication conclude that most young Russians share the positions of adaptability, actualism as a choice of educational strategy. This is determined by factors of an objective and subjective nature, where the objectification of social conditions acts as an influence on the subjective choice of youth. Noting the importance of social and territorial differentiation, the authors of the paper substantiate the provision on the design of the future, on the formation of lifestyles and a set of life goals of Russian youth as an opportunity to escape the limited pragmatic turn in education. As a final judgment, the relationship between the orientation to skilled activities and the configuration of responses to changes in the educational system is determined. It is concluded that in domestic social science and humanities there is a need to understand the educational strategies of Russian youth as the ability of Russian youth to design the image of the future, taking into account the growing influence of social innovations.

“Doomed to Good Relations”

This article sheds new light on the end of the Cold War and the fate of anti-imperialism in the twentieth century by exploring how the Soviet Union and the Islamic Republic of Iran achieved a rapprochement in the late 1980s. Both the USSR and Iran had invested significant resources into presenting themselves as the leaders of the anti-imperialist movement and “the global movement of Islam,” and both the Soviet and Iranian governments sought to export their models of anti-imperialist postcolonial statehood to Afghanistan. However, by the mid-1980s both the Soviet Union and revolutionary Iran were forced to confront the limits to their anti-imperialist projects amid the increasing pull of globalization. Elites in both countries responded to these challenges by walking back their commitments from world revolution and agreeing to maintain the Najibullah regime in Afghanistan as a bulwark against Islamist forces hostile to Marxism-Leninism and Iran's brand of Islamic revolution. This joint pragmatic turn, however, contributed to a drought in anti-imperialist politics throughout the Middle East, leaving the more radical voices of transnational actors as one of the only consistent champions of anti-imperialism. Drawing on new sources from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as sources from Iran, Afghanistan, and the “Afghan Arabs,” the article sheds empirical and analytical light on discussions of the fate of anti-imperialism in the twilight of the Cold War.

Contrastivity and comparability: pragmatic variation across pluricentric varieties

The recent pragmatic turn in the study of pluricentric varieties marks a shift in analytical focus, with increasingly more research contrasting the conventions of language use and interaction across pluricentric varieties. This turn demands new data types and new methods of analysis which uphold the principles of contrastivity and comparability. Addressing this basic requirement for the case of cross-varietal speech act analyses, the present article examines the contextual factors to be considered in the choice of data types and the potential definition and usability of a pragmatic variable in speech act analyses across data types. These considerations are applied to a cross-varietal analysis of responses to thanks in direction-giving exchanges across English in Canada, England and Ireland. The study highlights the frequent necessity of a multi-faceted definition of the pragmatic variable. In addition, challenges of contextual equivalence which emerge in the course of the analysis highlight a basic need for research to regularly re-examine the linguistic context and the definition of the pragmatic variable and to potentially redefine the variable during the analytical process. The contrastive analysis reveals a more extensive use of routinised responses to thanks in the Canadian English data relative to the Irish English and English English data. A more complex closing, with more continuations and confirmation checks, is shown to characterise the Irish English data, a finding which is suggested to potentially relate to a strong orientation towards hospitality in the Irish context.

Epistemic affordances in gestalt perception as well as in emotional facial expressions and gestures

Summary Methodological problems often arise when a special case is confused with the general principle. So you will find affordances only for ‚artifacts’ if you restrict the analysis to ‚artifacts’. The general principle, however, is an ‚invitation character’, which triggers an action. Consequently, an action-theoretical approach known as ‚pragmatic turn’ in cognitive science is recommended. According to this approach, the human being is not a passive-receptive being but actively produces those action effects that open up the world to us (through ‚active inferences’). This ‚ideomotor approach’ focuses on the so-called ‚epistemic actions’, which guide our perception as conscious and unconscious cognitions. Due to ‚embodied cognition’ the own body is assigned an indispensable role. The action theoretical approach of ‚enactive cognition’ enables that every form can be consistently processualized. Thus, each ‚Gestalt’ is understood as the process result of interlocking cognitions of ‚forward modelling’ (which produces anticipations and enables prognoses) and ‚inverse modelling’ (which makes hypotheses about genesis and causality). As can be shown, these cognitions are fed by previous experiences of real interaction, which later changes into a mental trial treatment, which is highly automated and can therefore take place unconsciously. It is now central that every object may have such affordances that call for instrumental or epistemic action. In the simplest case, it is the body and the facial expressions of our counterpart that can be understood as a question and provoke an answer/reaction. Thus, emotion is not only to be understood as expression/output according to the scheme ‚input-processing-output’, but acts itself as a provocative act/input. Consequently, artifacts are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for affordances. Rather, they exist in all areas of cognition—from Enactive Cognition to Social Cognition.

The Pragmatic Turn in Clinical Research

How does knowledge obtained in clinical trials apply to the actual treatment of patients? This question has recently acquired a new significance amidst complaints about the limited ability of trial results to improve clinical practice. Pragmatic clinical trials have been advocated to address this problem. In this article, I trace the emergence of the pragmatic turn in clinical research, starting from the first mention of ‘pragmatic trial’ in 1967, and analyse the changes to how pragmatism has been conceived. I argue that contemporary version of pragmatism risks missing the mark by focusing exclusively on establishing similarity between the trial and the clinic for the purpose of greater generalizability. This focus eclipses the move for carefully aligning medical experimentation with conditions, needs and concerns in the clinic aimed at greater usefulness.

Emotions and Valuations: Notre-Dame de Paris on Fire as a Case Study for Axiological Sociology

The emotional reactions aroused by the fire that partly destroyed Notre-Dame de Paris in April 2019 can be analyzed as “valuations” in the light of the pragmatic sociology of values, since they provide empirically grounded material allowing for the description and modeling of the actual implementations and effects of valuations. After a quick summary of the recent history of the pragmatic turn in sociology as related to the sociology of valuation, and a short reflection on the relationship between emotions and values, the fire of Notre-Dame de Paris is used as a case study in the light of “axiological sociology”, a model built on value judgments observed in various contexts, including the display of emotions. This article intends to demonstrate both empirically and theoretically how important it is for the social sciences to consider values as an autonomous issue, deserving to be treated as “axiological facts”, as any other kind of social fact.

ON SOME SOCIO-PRAGMATIC DIMENSIONS OF BORROWING FROM ENGLISH INTO SERBIAN

The recent pragmatic turn in the research on language contact and linguistic borrowing emphasizes the role of discourse, the speakers’ motivations and the social context, along with the structural, semantic and pragmatic aspects. Following the theoretical framework postulated in Andersen (2014), Andersen et al. (2017), Peterson (2017), Peterson, Beers Fagersten (2018), and focusing on the borrowing of pragmatic markers from English into Serbian, this article discusses several, often interrelated phenomena, which have been identified as associated with pragmatic borrowing. They are the functional shift (in particular, the weakening of the illocutionary force and the narrowing of the scope of use of the borrowed pragmatic items), semantic bleaching, indexing of particular social identities, and licensing of certain linguistic and social behaviours, possibly unsuitable with the use of native Serbian pragmatic markers. The article provides numerous illustrative contextualized examples of English pragmatic markers borrowed into Serbian, extracted from various electronic sources of written Serbian. They include the politeness markers pliz and sori, the expletives shit, fuck and the related forms such as who/what the fuck, wtf, and the abbreviations omg and rip, which are examined in their pragmatic, semantic, and social aspects.

On Commandment as Refuge: Exploring the Politics of Health and Indigenous African Religion on Covid-19

This paper explores the significance of the turn to the religion of the family and the clan (i.e., indigenous African religion) taking place under the contemporary conditions of Covid-19 in many African countries. It does this in order to exhibit the Africanity that is hidden by this otherwise pragmatic turn. The paper explores this Africanity by drawing from the classical African story of Seila-Tsatsi, which it argues has its roots in religious education. The key aim of its examination of this Africanity is interrogate a politics of health it claims the World Health Organisation advances. The paper does not explore this turn by accounting for the meanings individuals attribute to it but is rather abstract and conceptual in its approach. The argument it makes is that the contemporary turn to the religion of the family and the clan exhibits desire for an inclusive form of relationality that ought to inform fair, equitable and just health outcomes. It argues that the WHO’s politics of health is blind to this model because it stubbornly upholds binary thought.

Language – speech – social inclusion

The study presents an overview of reflections on the synergic application of methodological paradigms in predominantly paradigmatic structuralism after the communicative and pragmatic turn in linguistics. The reflections on methodological continuity are applied to the research of the active aspect of language rooted in the real social world. These theoretical pillars of linguistic research are seen in relation to the methodological situation in the humanities, as well as in the social sciences and are enriched with stimuli from the functioning of the so-called civil science. The foundations of researching and stimulating social inclusion are laid on the background of the mentioned theoretical frameworks, with the support of a selected professional semi-variety of the national language. The so-called easy language rooted in the professional vocabulary for the laymen, created by linguists and supported by civil science in the conditions of liberalization of the digital era society, becomes the medium for optimizing social relations between experts and non-experts.

Habermas, Rorty, and the Problem of Competent Interlocutors

In texts such as “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn” Jürgen Habermas defends a theory that associates, on the one hand, the truth-claim raised by a speaker for a proposition p with, on the other hand, the requirement that p be “defendable on the basis of good reasons […] at any time and against anybody”. This, as is known, has been the target of criticisms by Rorty, who−in spite of agreeing with Habermas on the central tenet that the way of evaluating our beliefs must be argumentative practice−declares that the only “ideal presupposed by discourse” is “that of being able to justify your beliefs to a competent audience”. We will consider two texts from 1971, -surprisingly neglected in most approaches to the debate-, in which Habermas did include such a “competence condition” to elucidate the notion of truth. We will discuss whether there are good reasons to relinquish such a condition and to refer, instead, only to the formal or procedural properties of argumentative exchanges, as Habermas does in presenting the notion of “ideal speech situation”. As we will try to argue, there are no such good reasons.